EVE®: Templar One (5 page)

“Difficult to trust them, I know,” he said.

“They’re an abomination,” Souro sneered.
“Present company excluded, of course.”

“Of course.
Yet the people voted one to be their President.”

“So they did.
Not long after they burned a man to death for treason.”

“Democracy is indifferent to the hypocrisy of its own people.”

“Which
people
are you referring to?”
Souro scoffed, downing more of the potent drink.
“Those lucky enough to live in secure space are the biggest hypocrites of all.
For them, this war is peripheral: It doesn’t affect their lives in the slightest, and the goddamn corporations are happy to keep it that way.
If they knew what we know—”

“Nothing would change,” Jacus interrupted.
“As you say, all the wealth here insulates people from caring too much.”

“That won’t last forever.”

“No, not without curbing the body count,” Roden said, leaning forward, “or without a technical breakthrough to smash the stalemate.”

“Aha—so
that’s
why you’ve come here,” Souro said.
“You were right to say you could have learned all this elsewhere.
Like from your own Intelligence Director.”

“I need both sides of the story, and I have neither the time nor patience to play politics,” Jacus replied drily.
“Advancements in drone tech were available while you were still in office.
Why weren’t they deployed?”

Souro laughed.

“Your Grand Admiral is insolent, and you don’t trust your own cabinet,” he said, leaning back.
“What do you need to do to earn some respect?
Visit old Presidents for advice?”

“Charming,” Jacus said.
“Please answer the question.”

Souro was surprised at his own urge to do so.

“Every AI that we’ve ever experimented with can be compromised—even those produced by Roden Shipyards.
I doubt that’s changed since I left.”

The eyes began to glow again.
Jacus gave the truth agent in Souro’s whiskey more time to do its work.

“Tragically, our efforts to cut losses in this war haven’t been very effective,” Jacus said.
“But I’m sure there are other options in the vault we haven’t tried.”

“Oh, there are a few things,” Souro slurred, now feeling the effects of the drink.
“Dark, nasty stuff…”

“I just want to know about one,” Jacus said, more deliberately than usual.
“A classified Navy program called ‘The Cain Directive.’”

“‘Cain…’” Souro’s eyes closed, and his head fell back into the chair as though in a meditative trance.

Jacus studied his prey intently.
“Please tell me about that one, Souro.”

The former President was now completely anesthetized.
Though unconscious, his motor skills, audio processing, recall, and cognitive abilities were responsive.
He spoke slowly but clearly—and would remain pleasantly agreeable for the rest of their conversation.

“The Navy floated several proposals for creating supersoldiers,” Souro started.
“Most were like the Caldari model: They combined elements of cloning and cybernetic engineering.
Some proof-of-concepts became elite fighting units, but not in any widespread capacity.”

“Why not?”
Jacus asked.

“Because attrition is still costly,” Souro said.

“You mean from the expense of producing the soldier?”

“No,” Souro said, as some drool began trickling from the corner of his mouth.
“It’s losing experience that hurts.
You can’t replace the knowledge that dies with a veteran soldier quickly.
But there was another idea.”

Jacus stood and began gently dabbing Souro’s face with a handkerchief.

“Please go on,” Jacus encouraged.

“One group wanted funding to apply immortal-capsuleer technology to soldiers.”

“Interesting,” Jacus noted.
“What happened to the idea?”

“No one thought it could work,” Souro said.
“The equipment that supports cognitive-state transfers would have to be miniaturized.
Then you need cybernetic tech that preserves a soldier’s memory.
And all of this would need to happen in an uncontrolled battlefield environment.”

Jacus reflected a moment.
On starships, the capsule is what managed state transfers of a capsuleer’s mind at the point of destruction.
When the protective pod was breached, a snapshot of the pilot’s brain was taken and transferred into a clone using entangled communication systems.
But it was supported by a huge interstellar infrastructure network based on stations and stargates.

“Our best people couldn’t figure this out,” Souro said.
“Then there were ethical constraints.”

“How so?”

“Testing new technology on humans, even if it passed survivability assurance in AI constructs, wasn’t something I was comfortable with,” Souro said.
“I didn’t see anything promising enough to justify it, so I canceled the program.
Creating an immortal soldier was beyond our capabilities.
It probably still is.”

“Do you know if anyone else is pursuing this?”
Jacus asked.

“We know the Caldari aren’t,” Souro answered.
“Tibus Heth allegedly scoffed at the idea of immortal soldiers.
We’re fairly certain the Minmatar have tried and failed.
But we don’t know about the Amarr Empire.
We haven’t been able to see inside there since the Elders’ attack.”

“Very well,” Jacus said.
The ex-President’s maid, who had been in the employ of Roden Shipyards as a spy for much longer than as a maid for Souro Foiritan, quietly left the room.
Per Jacus’s request, no one on that station would ever see her again.
The sentry drones allowed her to pass, all the while maintaining their active jamming of the recording equipment in the room.
The memory of the apartment’s AI would be deleted and replaced with video of Souro drinking himself to sleep.
He would awaken later with no recollection of the encounter and find a letter of resignation from his maid.

“I have just a few more questions for you,” Jacus said, making sure that Souro was comfortable.

“Does the Broker have this technology?”

“We don’t think so.
He operates by making multiple copies of himself and manually pushing situational-state information to a central repository, presumably the original copy.”

“Are you certain?”

“No.
You never can be with him.”

“But you think he’s dead?”

“There’s plenty of evidence to suggest as much.”

“If he’s still alive, do you think he would actively pursue this tech?”

“Without question.”

6

HEIMATAR REGION—HED CONSTELLATION

AMAMAKE SYSTEM—PLANET II: PIKE’S LANDING

CORE FREEDOM COLONY

SOVEREIGNTY OF THE MINMATAR REPUBLIC

At long last, the night mercifully surrendered to dawn.
A grayish white fog began to snake its way through the rocky terrain like blood seeping from an old wound.
The surviving Minmatar Valklear soldiers defending Core Freedom removed their night-vision equipment to see the unenhanced wickedness in its true light: columns of smoke rising from craters as shattered war machines and mutilated corpses littered the barren landscape.
The Valklears had stopped the Amarr attackers within sight of their objective, but only barely.

Weary to the bone, the Valklears who could still stand began the “mercy and salvage” part of their mission: collecting weapons, unspent ammunition, incapacitated drones, reusable cybernetic limbs or organs from fallen soldiers, and any functional mechanical parts that remained.
With no reliable support from the Republic Fleet, every last bit of scrap was precious for the colony, and anything salvageable would be given to the city engineers for reprocessing.

Given the dire lack of supplies, the “mercy” component of the mission was the unconditional execution and harvesting of any surviving enemy soldiers, including officers.
They were worth more dead to the Minmatars than alive.

Surveying the battlefield from a gunship was General Vlad Kintreb, who at 160 years of age had been a soldier for more than a century.
Though he had experienced far worse, he knew that for many of his troops, this had almost certainly been the longest night of their lives.

He ordered the pilot to set the craft down amid the carnage.
Two MTACs and a squad of commandos rushed ahead to secure the landing site, as several Valklears looked on with blank, dazed expressions.

The General was going downrange, they muttered, to check upon his children in the field.

*   *   *

VLAD KINTREB STILL WALKED
under his own power, although most of the bones in his legs were reconstructed from titanium.
The usual mineral-scented air reeked of explosives and ionized gas.
He breathed the familiar stench deeply, ignoring the rush of past battles roaring through his memory.

Behind him, the bodyguards kept their distance, while the deep metallic impact of towering combat MTACs flanked either side of him.
The chicken-legged walkers, “Spearstrike” assault variants of Minmatar design, were now a salvaged patchwork of gold and brown armor plates.
Minmatar cannons hung beneath weapon pylons lined with Amarr guidance systems.
Vlad grunted at the sight of them.
Like the rest of his garrison, there was a time when these magnificent vehicles were intact.

Pausing over a disemboweled corpse, he reached down to turn the remnants of its severed torso over.
The stub of a spine, charred black from an explosion that detached the pelvis, drew his attention.
Unfazed by the gore that fell away from exit wounds behind the rib cage, he ran his fingers up the bone, then inspected the skull and jaw.

“Kameiras,” he growled, shaking his head.

For General Kintreb, the irony was sickening.
Kintreb’s knowledge of human anatomy was developed in classrooms and raw battlefield experience.
He could tell just from looking at bones what he was dealing with.
His Valklears had defended the colony from the Amarr elite infantry known as Kameiras, who were entirely of Minmatar origin.
Genetically, Minmatar tribal ethnicities tended to be taller and more physically robust than the True Amarr.
But the Kameiras were bred from the best physical specimens of slaves in the Amarr Empire to become holy warriors.
Eligible children were placed in a conditioning program so optimized that by the age of nineteen, they were as strong and powerful as was humanly possible without the aid of cybernetic augmentation.

The Kameiras were a significant investment for the Empire and were the best infantrymen they had—arguably more reliable than even their own Paladins.

Vlad stood slowly, ignoring the tinge of pain in his lower back.
Distant, muted explosions rumbled through the landscape, and more gunships roared overhead.
Somewhere in the mountains beyond, Valklears were cleaning up the last pockets of stragglers who still had the strength to fight back.

General Kintreb brushed the grime off his gloves, glancing back toward the outer fortifications.
From a kilometer away, a great complex dominated the entire horizon.
Deep behind its walls were antiship defenses to which the colony population—and the division of troops left defending it—owed their lives.
If not for them, they would have been vaporized by orbital bombardments ages ago.

The infrastructure at Core Freedom was immensely valuable.
Covering nearly five hundred square kilometers, a conglomerate of industrial outposts provided access to the massive resource deposits of Pike’s Landing.
Ore extractors, processors, and an alloy smelting plant provided the nucleus of what was once a thriving industrial hub for the entire system.
Central to all this was the colony’s most prized possession: its space elevator, the only one on the planet.
With its six sky cables tethered to the orbiting industrial mega-complex high above, massive amounts of material could be transported offworld at a rate that dwarfed the lift capacity of even the largest dropships.

With its mineral wealth and developed surface infrastructure, the Empire coveted Core Freedom.
But getting ships into position to direct pinpoint orbital strikes was impossible because of its deadly antiship missile batteries.
All ranged ordnance attacks were vulnerable to point defenses and shields.
The only way to take the colony and its infrastructure intact was to land troops well beyond the perimeter and unleash a frontal assault, disabling the planetary defenses and then letting the guns in space impose their will on the targets below.

Last night, Amarr launched a ferocious assault with their best troops leading the charge, and nearly succeeded in breaching the last line of ground defenses before the outer walls.
Stretched too thin by the conflict raging closer to their homeworlds, the Republic Fleet couldn’t afford to divert resources to the frontier, and reinforcements would’ve been easily shot out of space by capsuleers loyal to the Empress.
In fact, very little of the equipment available for General Kintreb’s troops was original-issue gear.
Most of them deployed with Amarr weapons, all scavenged from prior battles.

Unless something drastic changed, the General knew that they couldn’t hold the colony for much longer.
Pleading to the Republic Fleet for help—even to Sanmatar Shakor himself—would do him no good, as there were countless other generals, on other Minmatar frontier worlds, all begging for the same.

Shadowed by men and machines, General Kintreb continued his walk, slowly making his way toward a fallen Valklear lying upright against the wall of a shallow crater.
Peering over the ledge, he found another scene of defaced humanity: the corpses of two soldiers, one Valklear, the other Kameira, sprawled opposite each other.
The Valklear corpse—whose IDENT tag he recognized—was decapitated.
The Kameira was on his back, with a charred blast hole in place of where his heart should have been.
A white-hot microblade was still clutched and active in his hand.

General Kintreb imagined the men holding this position were surprised by the crazed Kameira, who—with no ammunition remaining—was determined to fight to the end.
Several laaknyds—voracious scavenging insects accidentally introduced to the planet’s ecosystem—had already begun partaking of the decaying corpses.
One emerged from the chest wound of the fallen Kameira, its serrated pincers full of flesh.
Before long, there would be many more of them.

Vlad knelt before the upright Valklear, in whom the laaknyds showed no interest, and knew he was still alive.

He gently removed the mask and night-vision scope.
Wide, unfocused eyes appeared.

Behind him, his bodyguards readied their aim on the soldier that Vlad was determined to help.

A rifle lay across his lap, which Vlad slowly lifted and set aside.
An inspection followed: short, irregular breaths, rapid pulse, some scarring on the armor, but no breaches.

This was neuro-trauma.
PSYKLAD munitions were reportedly used ahead of the assault.
Any soldier who was unprotected could hallucinate to the point of self-destructive insanity.

General Kintreb didn’t care about the danger.

“State your name and rank,” he ordered.

His eyes blinked, but did nothing else.
The upper torso of the closest MTAC swiveled slowly; the turret beneath its cockpit rotated toward them.

Vlad placed a hand on the Valklear’s shoulder.

“Let’s just start with your name.”

Another blink; a tremor ran through the soldier’s hands.

“I’m sorry about your squadmate,” Vlad continued.
“But you have to get to your feet.”

Laaknyds were approaching the corpses in groups now, segregating themselves into tasks.
Some continued their gory excavation, passing fresh meat to couriers that scampered back toward the nest.
The larger bulls took up sentry positions, forming a protective cordon around the carcasses.
Several laaknyds were facing General Kintreb and his fallen soldier, their raised pincers warning them not to tamper with their meal.

“Stay with me,” Vlad said, gripping both shoulders.
“We’ve got to go,
now
—”

The movement was too sudden.
The soldier lunged forward and clamped onto the General’s neck, pulling him inward.
Vlad sensed that this was either panic or a delusional plea for help, but that no longer mattered, as the MTAC—the only protective unit with a clear line of fire—unleashed a single cannon round with a disabled fuse.

Vlad felt warm blood splash across his face, and the grip around his neck released.
His pulse accelerated out of anger, not surprise.
The round entered the man’s shoulder, exited through his upper back, and burrowed into several meters of volcanic rock.
The soldier’s arm had been shorn clean off, scattering the insects as it came to rest near the protective cordon.

“Send medics to my position,” Vlad ordered.

The body armor was doing its part to save the Valklear’s life, releasing biofoam around the wound and injecting the man with adrenaline to keep him from slipping into shock.
Vlad tore a medpack off the man’s kit and removed more biofoam packets, stuffing them into the open wounds.

A beat-up air sled arrived within seconds.
Two medics quickly jumped out, hoisting the unconscious soldier into its flatbed.

“Neuro-trauma, possible PSYKLAD ordnance,” Vlad grumbled.
“Wipe his memory before he wakes up.”

The medic quickly saluted.
“Yes, sir.”

A moment later, they were gone.

General Kintreb didn’t acknowledge the MTAC pilot who fired the shot, nor the bodyguards who eased off their weapons in relief.
Instead, he glared at the laaknyds, several of which were taking test nibbles of the severed arm.

Help from the Republic wasn’t coming.
The blood coursing down his face was evidence of that.
Their survival was not likely.
It was time to break some long-standing principles.

“Commander Bishop,” Vlad muttered.

The voice was loud and clear.
“Yes, sir?”

“Mordu’s Legion,” Vlad said, wiping some blood off his cheeks.
The sun was higher now, and the insects were working quickly to get back into their nest for shelter.
“Make the call.”